The Kirkus Prize is one of the richest literary awards in the world, with a prize of $50,000 bestowed annually to authors of fiction, nonfiction and young readers’ literature. It was created to celebrate the 81 years of discerning, thoughtful criticism Kirkus Reviews has contributed to both the publishing industry and readers at large. Books that earned the Kirkus Star with publication dates between November 1, 2014, and October 31, 2015, are automatically nominated for the 2015 Kirkus Prize, and the winners will be selected on October 23, 2015, by an esteemed panel composed of nationally respected writers and highly regarded booksellers, librarians and Kirkus critics.

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Amazingly, this month marks the start of my fifth year writing about crime, mystery and thriller fiction for Kirkus Reviews. When I go back now to glance through my early columns—including my first, about a handful of the genre’s consistently reliable contributors—I can hardly believe how much I’ve learned to squeeze into these pieces, or how broadly I have cast my net in search of top-notch reading matter.

Something I have learned over all this time is that before sitting ...

Another collage-style historical about flying, friendship, and family—and about how family transcends both blood and race—from the author of Code Name Verity. It’s set in Ethiopia during 1935, during the invasion by Italy. Even if Wein wasn’t an auto-read for me ...

“I wonder if all hearts are made with the same pockets for fear and pain and sadness. They must not be, or if they are, maybe we all don’t know how to use them. Because otherwise so many of our stories would have ended differently.”

In 2012, Courtney Summers wrote a book called This Is Not a Test—her take on the zombie apocalypse, from the perspective of a teenage girl named Sloane. In that novel, the terror is ...

If you look closely at the endpapers of Sidewalk Flowers, the new book from JonArno Lawson, illustrated by Sydney Smith, you get a sense of the beauty within. The endpapers are filled with the tiny, intricate drawings of flowers and birds. Keep going, and you fall into the story of a young girl, walking the city streets with her father, who finds beauty in unexpected places.

This story, I should add right off the bat, is wordless. Lawson, an award-winning ...

For this week's column, let's go back in time quite a bit. When I first started writing for Kirkus a couple of years ago, I started with Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. Shelley has remained a durable starting point for the modern science-fiction genre, but other scholars note that science fiction didn't emerge out of a vacuum: numerous authors experimented with mixing fantastic and realistic elements together into fiction, over the years producing ...

While reading the last 25 or so pages of Becky Albertalli’s Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda, I happily cried all over myself, laughed out loud, and occasionally paused to clutch the book to my chest…and I was so blissed out that I didn’t care that I happened to be manning the circulation desk or that I was arming my more smirky patrons with prime Leila-mocking fodder. The last book that inspired a reaction that publically passionate—not counting Susan Juby’s ...

I had to laugh watching the Oscars on Sunday when Melanie Griffith and Dakota Johnson tussled over whether or not Mom/Melanie should see the FSoG movie. Looking over various blog posts and tweets, I guess I disagree with a lot of people out there on the interwebs. I don’t think Melanie is ashamed of her daughter for making the film. I think she feels that watching her daughter in the role of Anastasia Steele might be uncomfortable. I have ...

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